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Where are you from?
Chicago.
No, where are you really from?
The South side side of Chicago?
No, what are you?
For years, I couldn't explain why incidents like this made me feel so
uncomfortable.
You speak such good English, you must be good at math.
Your people's food is so spicy.
Innocuous on the surface, but when repeated 10,
20, 50 times, I would start to get annoyed.
But these were just curious people with good intentions, right?
What right did I have to be annoyed?
It wasn't until I was in college that I realized what
I was experiencing were racial microaggressions.
Psychologist Derald Wing Sue defines microaggressions as brief,
everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to
certain individuals based on their group membership.
While they can be the product of environmental or
behavioral slights, most of the time they are unintentional.
And they happen all the time.
In fact, in a recent survey that I sent out to my GSB classmates,
77% of respondents identified as having been the victim of a microaggression.
So why do we care?
Well, take this example.
When a young woman repeatedly hears, you have a great shot at that
promotion because they need a female on their leadership team.
She starts to feel like she doesn't deserve to be there based on
her own merits alone.
She starts to feel like she doesn't belong.
Think that was too extreme of an example?
Take my opening question.
No, where are you really from,
implies that Chicago cannot be a valid answer.
I cannot be American.
I must be a foreigner.
I cannot claim to be from the place that I'm from because of how I look.
And I perpetually don't belong.
Now, the purpose of my talk today is not to play the victim or
to even fantasize about a perfect world where there are no microaggressions.
That would be unrealistic, because of all of the unique backgrounds, experiences,
and implicit biases that everybody on this Earth carries with us, me included.
Instead, I want to recognize that these tiny snubs exist.
All of us commit them, and that's going to happen.
While our intent is not necessarily malicious,
different comments land with different people in different ways.
And I'm here, firstly, to bring awareness to that fact of life.
And more importantly, to tell you what I've learned we can do if and
when we find ourselves on either end of a microaggression.
A couple of years ago,
I had a boss casually throw me the advice to act more like the men in the room.
I was stunned, I had no words to express how I was feeling.
So I just said okay, and walked back to my desk.
Six months passed, and I heard those words haunting me every single day.
You should act more like a man.
Being a woman is not good enough.
My sense of self worth, my confidence, and my productivity took a hit,
as I desperately tried to figure out how to make sense of that comment.
How could we have avoided this situation?
Let's turn to the receiving end.
There are three things that you can do when you find yourself the recipient of
a microaggression.
First and most importantly, prioritize yourself.
There are situations where it doesn't make sense to respond.
If I had gotten this comment from a stranger I'd never see again, or
perhaps if my safety could have been compromised if I did respond,
I would give myself the permission to not say anything.
And I know that it's unfair that the emotional burden of whether or
not to respond falls on the recipient.
But the more comfortable we get with drawing boundaries and
predicting the implications to our lives if we do not respond, the easier it gets.
Second, if you're in a place to, ask clarifying questions.
I could have simply asked my boss, what exactly do you mean by that?
He likely would have said something about how I should be more confident, or
how I should be more aggressive with my good opinions.
No malintent, great.
And third, if you have the emotional bandwidth to,
state how the comment impacted you.
In one of the GSB's flagship classes on interpersonal dynamics, we always talk
about how I cannot assume your intent, since that's something only you know.
And that you cannot assume the impact that your words have on me,
since that's something only I know.
In the class, we call these assumptions crossing the net.
In the case of a microaggression, if it is productive to state how
the comment made you feel, it can help the perpetrator learn and
perhaps change their behavior for next time.
In my example, I could have simply told my boss,
when you tell me to act like a man, I feel frustrated and dejected.
Because I can never be enough due to who I am.
I did eventually confront my boss and tell him this, and
I remember he looked shocked.
He fumbled and admitted that he hadn't realized that's how I had taken it,
and that his intent was just to be helpful.
He did apologize for the effect that his advice had on me, and
I immediately felt like a part of the team again.
Let's quickly turn to the giving end.
A couple years ago I was joking with my friends in Seattle about our experiences
living there, when my friend made a comment about the lack of diversity there.
To which I said, [LAUGH] what do you care?
You're just a straight, white man.
I watched his face fall, and
immediately knew that I had crossed a line that I hadn't meant to.
Being the perpetrator of more than a few of these kinds of careless comments
has taught me three things that you can do when you find that you've just
committed a microaggression.
First, accept the other person's truth.
If they tell you how you made them feel, don't cross the net.
Trust their reality and use it to inform how you show up next time.
Which leads me to number two,
be open to change and learn from the experience.
Not only can that help you do better next time, but
that can help you become a better ally if you see similar
microaggressions being committed by others.
And third, if you find yourself feeling guilty,
remember we are only human.
Everybody makes mistakes.
Microaggressions are largely unintentional.
And their impact is not even uniform across members of the same group.
Different comments land with different people in different ways.
And while it's more than okay to be curious about where I'm from, the decision
to reject my truth turns ignorance into malice, and small pinches into a bruise.
It would be naive to think that we can completely rid the world of
microaggressions.
But we can react to them in a more productive way,
by strengthening our muscles of asking the questions and trusting the responses.
It is my hope that we are all better equipped to handle this
world's inevitable imperfect situations with greater empathy and trust.
So that nobody feels like they
don't belong, thank you.
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